Haunted (Chapter 3)
The next morning Alvin was not as embarrassed by his behaviour as he would have liked. Ideally he should have been flushed with a feeling of idiocy at the way he had been tricked by his own imagination. It caused him greater consternation that he did not feel a fool, but instead remained uneasy at the memory of his experience. Although the notion of a broken dream offered an obvious explanation, he could not bring himself to accept it. There was an immovable part of him that remained fixed on the idea that something untoward had been at hand.
This conviction was such that he felt moved to enter the adjacent room and check that all was well. At first everything seemed in order, or at least as much in order as was possible, given the strange way that the previous tenants had left the house. It was true that certain drawers were uneven in their arrangement, and one of the wardrobe doors leaned slightly open, but Alvin sensibly attributed this to his own investigations of the previous afternoon. Yet a troubling doubt required him to ask if he had really been so anxious as to leave the room in quite such disarray. He pulled at one or two of the drawers at random, though he could not have said what it was he sought, and was about to call an end to this pointless endeavour when he noticed a key, old and rusted, resting on a pile of white shirts. The contrast in their colour was marked and Alvin was surprised that he had not noticed it immediately the day before. He turned the key between his fingers, looking at it closely and observing a curious series of circular scratches that girdled its shaft, seemingly made by a small blade. If the scratches were intended as a mark of identification, it was still not easy to connect the key with any room he had so far come across. All the internal doors were unsecured and none of the cupboards required a key, so he imagined that it was for something he had not yet encountered. Perhaps something in the back garden. There was a toolshed and a summer house, he noted; most likely it was for one of those. He replaced the key where he had first failed to notice it, and left the room.
Alvin tried to apply himself to his work that day but made unsatisfactory progress. He made a call to the letting agent, thinking that his mind might be put at rest if the matter of the previous occupants’ departure was explained. The agent informed him that a forwarding address had indeed been left, in case of urgent communication or, as they put it, anything they had left behind should be sent on. However, it had so far not been able to speak to them in person.
The rest of the day was unproductive and Alvin was in a poor mood when he retired to bed that night. He slept fitfully for a couple of hours before once again being possessed by the same sensation of the previous night, namely that something else was moving about the house. It was only different in the respect that this thing was not in the next room, but was further along the corridor. In the next moment there came the soft but distinct sound of a door being tried, yet remaining resolutely shut. The noise produced a thrill of fear and he fancied that he could now hear footsteps approach, stop outside the next room, try the door and gain entry. There was a blessed respite of silence before the noises of the previous night came upon him again; the agitated pacing of the floor, the sounds of furniture being explored, the inescapable impression of a desperate search for something.
The fear was acute and Alvin knew that he was in danger of being subdued completely if he did not muster some activity of his own. Gathering what remained of his sensibilities he urged himself to move from his bed and leave the room. Unlike the previous occasion, when the intruder had immediately sensed the possibility of detection, the noises continued as Alvin approached the door of the next room. They possessed a strange quality – beyond the strangeness that they should have been heard at all – in that although they were quite emphatic in their clarity, they seemed distant. It was not possible that they emanated from a different room, though, as the direction was easily identifiable. Oddly faint and remote though the sounds were, Alvin was sure they came from within the room before him. He seized the door handle and at once the house returned to a sepulchral silence.
Kushalini 